You could get rid of Base line budgeting, cut all federal employees pay by 10% (Oh you think they’ll walk? Well let them and let them see the employment ops in the Real world) and then all social programs by 10%. Stop funding all sorts of crap not related to governance. Reimpose Welfare reform that took away generational welfare. Problem solved.
Sure, we could cut spending to get out of debt, but even the cuts you propose are nowhere near what would be necessary to do that. Not by a longshot!
The debt right now is 18.1 trillion dollars. Our total revenues last year were 3.34 trillion, with 3.9 trillion in expenditures. So we have to cut over half a trillion before we even get to the break even point and stop growing the debt. Let’s see how close your cuts get us:
* Get rid of baseline budgetting - Getting rid of baseline budgeting isn’t actually a cut, just a method to help prevent increases, so it doesn’t get us closer to paying off the debt.
* Cut Federal salaries by 10% - It’s tough to get figures on federal salaries in total, because they’re spread out between the different departments, however, this link:
http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk
gives us a figure for one month in 2013 of $16.5 billion. If we extrapolate that out to a year, it comes out to $200 billion a year. So cutting 10% of that gets us $20 billion.
* Cut social programs by 10% - For social programs, if we leave out medicare, social security and veteran’s benefits (because no politician will ever touch those), we spend about 1 trillion a year. So cutting 10% of that gets us $100 billion.
* Stop funding all sorts of crap not related to governance - This is too vague for me to quantify anything based on it, maybe name some specific programs and we can see what that adds up to.
* Reimpose Welfare reform - Welfare reform gets us little or nothing because the fraudsters all switched to SSDI fraud now, and again, politicians won’t touch social security. Could be some savings there if we can stop the fraud, but that’s tough to quantify too.
So, leaving off the couple proposals you made that I can’t put a figure to, we save only about $120 billion a year with your proposed budget cuts, and that still leaves us about $440 billion short of even stopping the debt from growing, much less starting to pay it down. So, you see, if we want to get out of this by cutting spending, it is going to take a lot more painful cuts that even the ones you proposed. Yet, I think the ones you proposed are already probably too radical for the voters to accept, unfortunately.